Gotham Knights Diaries Part Two

This is my exploration of Gotham Knights where I will chronicle my playthrough like a text-based Let’s Play. I’ll point out all of the Easter Eggs that I can spot in the footnotes at the end of each part. Now let’s continue Gotham Knights…

Having inherited a case as part of Batman’s video will, we were on the hunt for information about Kirk Langstrom to find out how the case had caused the Dark Knight’s death…

With Belfry getting brought up to working order by Alfred Pennyworth and the boys, it was up to me as Batgirl to go out and punch some criminals in the face. The closest disturbance was about 90m away, so I headed there first, finding a car being broken into by two thieves. Next was an assault, but before I could go to the third one Alfred called from Belfry to direct me somewhere else. To access the hard drive that I’d grabbed from Langstrom’s lab, I needed to obtain the bio-decryption key which was probably on his corpse, in GCPD’s morgue.

However, along the route was an attempted break-in, so I rumbled that before spotting another one! Once I put a stop to that, and since it was the final marker on my scanner, I decided to go look into another crime. Unfortunately, the marker ended up being nothing? It clearly should have been something, maybe a third break-in, but there was nothing to find, so I headed over to GCPD on my Batcycle.

A large contingent of police vehicles left as I arrived, and I snuck my way to the precinct roof, then down into the garage. There were four officers guarding a broken shutter, so I hid behind a police car and threw a Batarang to distract them. They turned around almost immediately, spotting me the instant that I moved out of cover, and I had to beat them up…

Once inside the station, I snuck upstairs into the weight room, and then into a ventilation shaft. As I went I overheard a cop wanting to beat up a gang member, how the morgue was “packed” due to both Langstrom and “John Doe” (AKA Ra’s al Ghul) corpses, and how Renee Montoya “was loyal to Gordon” and couldn’t be trusted by crooked cops. Speaking of the detective, upon leaving the shaft I found myself in one of the interrogation viewing rooms where Commissioner Kane was chewing out Montoya. It was unclear what the detective had done, but it seemed to be the latest in an ongoing issue that the anti-vigilante commissioner had with her.

In the interrogation room next door the recording equipment had been disabled, but watching the cops talking (and unable to hear any of it) it seemed nothing untoward was going on. Just down the hall were some freestanding holding cells and a few police officers monitoring them. As a prisoner kicked off, one of the cops left their position and gave me time to use my grapple up to the evidence room.

I say evidence “room”, but it was just part of what I would soon discover was a very large area that simply must have had its own elevator. For one thing, the very first thing that I noticed was the Bat-Signal, a huge floodlight with a bat symbol on it that did not come in through any regular sized doorway. Elsewhere in the evidence room were several pounds (about a kilogram) of diamonds which had been stolen by Catwoman, parts of Ra’s al Ghul’s armour, and the ventriloquist dummy Scarface.

Going past the Bat-Signal I found a chest which contained 137 vials of something green, I assumed for crafting later. There was also a door out into the bullpen with a few police officers doing work in the dimly lit, large room. Security cameras dotted various walls and pillars, so I looked for a way to avoid everything and stumbled across another chest, this one with 384 green vials. I managed to avoid everything below with a handy grapple which took me clear across the room. I was treated to some of Gotham’s finest talking about both being fine with accidentally killing a teenager and declaring the Langstrom case “an accident”.

Since I needed to disable the cameras, because I would no doubt be coming back this way and couldn’t count on the lucky grapple again, so I snuck past one of the officers to get to a security panel. However, something caught my eye on a desk, and it turned out to be a report about Nightwing, and how he was working alongside the Blüdhaven police department. Apparently, Lt. Svoboda was looking into who was working with him, and the report was signed by Romy Chandler.

After deactivating the cameras and heading upstairs, I found a locked door. Alfred suggested checking the sergeant’s desk, so I snuck over towards it until I was distracted by more reports popping up in my AR display as I was keeping an eye on the police. The first one was about Robin, confirming that he wasn’t yet 18, and some kind of genius, written by Detective Crispus Allen. I grabbed the keycard, then the report by Detective Marcus Driver about Batgirl which suggested that she was either a dancer, or an active police officer.

As I almost got spotted, I decided to abandon the final report and head upstairs. The place was in a bit of disarray, and the forensics team were on the floor unconscious. Opening the doors at the end, I found the morgue and Ra’s al Ghul’s corpse — but also his daughter Talia al Ghul! She stabbed the corpse in the chest before addressing me, saying that she was trying to clean up her father’s mess, which was to say shove him into the cremation oven. She didn’t say another word, even when I tried to confront her, just throwing a kunai at me and disappearing in a cloud of smoke…

Grabbing the kunai from the wall, I went to find Langstrom’s body in the next room, and Robin suggested looking for something that would activate when exposed to genetic material. That was easy to work out, as the doctor apparently didn’t have diabetes, so the glucose monitor stood out, and clearly the best way to get genetic material was by dipping it into one of the tubes of blood that were sat beside him. Curiously, a report appeared when I scanned the corpse, saying that there were multiple stab wounds on his arms, legs, chest and head — but the chest and head were “precise” wounds? It was curious wording, and made me wonder if there had been more than one assailant…

Combining the monitor and blood sample turned the glucometer into a USB drive, but unfortunately that was when an alarm began blaring. Red Hood warned that SWAT was on the scene, but he could help by turning out the lights (not that they were very helpful anyway… In the bullpen, I tried to replicate my “grapple across the bullpen” trick, but wound up alerting the SWAT team… Knocking out two of them, I managed to lose the rest before exiting through a door on the lower level, and made it to the exit.

Jumping on the Batcycle, I tore out of the garage level! Then I hit a car, pressed the wrong button and ejected… On the plus side, while running away from the police and grappling onto rooftops, I easily evaded them.

The status screen told me that on Night 1 I had stopped zero crimes, completed one bonus objective, and rescued one citizen.

A cutscene began and everyone reconvened in the daytime in front of the Batcomputer, wearing their civilian attire. The hard drive had lab notes, formulas, financial records, research into hearing loss, and evidence of human trials. It all pointed to criminals being used as guinea pigs, and paid for it, but the topic of conversation changed when Alfred reported the holographic imaging system was operational. So, Barbara pulled up holograms of Ra’s and Talia, confirming that DNA from the kunai had confirmed that it was Ra’s who went into the cremation oven.

Tim suggested that we find Talia and ask her why she hadn’t tried to resurrect her father in a Lazarus Pit. While that didn’t work at GCPD, Barbara says that she’ll analyse the kunai to find “trace elements”, which probably means we’ll locate Talia in the one section of Gotham that has this one exact type of dust… Dick also suggested that we hit the streets and find out if anyone had it in for Kirk Langstrom, and the cutscene ended.

I received 1,320xp, 100 books, and 50 green dots, as well as hit level two in something. To say that the HUD elements leave much to be desired would be giving this game a lot of credit… With the holographic system up and running, it was strange to find that they had set up a few cork boards to pin newspapers and photos to, along with red string connecting things, but I checked it out and found Talia’s kunai as well as hard copies of all of the intel I had so far. Newspapers of the fire at the university and Bruce Wayne’s death, photos of the al Ghuls, and stuff stolen from GCPD.

There were also leads, which I checked out to see what the next steps were. Interrogate Freaks in Robinson Park, and see what the Mob could tell me in the West End. One of the test subjects may have taken out Langstrom, after all, so I just had to pick which one I would head to…

FOOTNOTES

Renee Montoya is a long-time Gotham cop who later became the vigilante The Question, and more recently Commissioner of Gotham City Police Department.
The Bat-Signal is probably one of the best known pieces of equipment in DC history, and usually sits on top of GCPD for the commissioner to activate, illuminating nearby clouds with the Batman symbol.
Catwoman (AKA Selina Kyle) has been a villain, anti-hero, and a hero in varying measures throughout the years, and is regularly paired off romantically with Batman.
Scarface is a puppet that accompanies the Ventriloquist, the name used by two criminals whose only power was to be pretty good at ventriloquism. The one in Gotham Knights apparently belongs to Peyton Riley, the second Ventriloquist.
Blüdhaven is the city a short distance from Gotham where Nightwing has fought crime for most of his career.
Lt. Elise Svoboda was a minor supporting character in Nightwing for a couple of years.
Romy Chandler is a police officer who was a character in 2003’s Gotham Central comic and basically nothing since.
Crispus Allen is a police officer who has a history with the Spirit of Vengeance known as The Spectre.
Marcus Driver is another police officer who was in 2003’s Gotham Central comic and basically nothing since.
Talia al Ghul is the mother to the current Robin (Damian Wayne) and sometimes leader of the League of Assassins, depending on how dead Ra’s is at the time.
Lazarus Pits are a (sometimes) finite resource for bringing the dead back to life, commonly used by Ra’s al Ghul, almost exclusively used by the League of Assassins.